1/ Whether or not you’ve heard the @BYDCompany mask story, and even if you know nothing about the EV giant, this is worth reading.
The story is in Chinese, but we attempted to translate it, because it’s incredible.
Please excuse the poor translation; we aren't fluent yet.
Shenzhen is the Technology Capital of the World, with Taylor Ogan – Manifold #107
Recorded live in Shenzhen with Taylor Ogan, the founder and CEO of Snowbull Capital, which invests in Chinese technology companies.
(00:00) - Shenzhen is the Technology Capital of the World, with Taylor Ogan
(00:53) - Meeting in Shenzhen
(02:40) - Greater Bay Area Explained
(06:36) - Shenzhen Boom Stories
(18:26) - China Tech Reality Check
(36:49) - China Tech Leapfrogging
(37:52) - Agentic AI on Phones
(41:27) - Jobs Wealth and Governance
(53:03) - Huawei Ownership and US Pushback
I shared more details, which Reuters just reported, on Bloomberg two months ago. Equity research, reporting, and certainly U.S. policy on China's chip development completely underestimate reality.
Taylor Ogan broke this story on Manifold in early 2025.
Taylor: ... there are teams at Huawei in two different parts of China that are working around the clock ... literally cut off from their friends and family just because the work they're doing is so sensitive. Imagine how quickly they're going to accelerate, Chinese complete domestic chip development.
Steve Hsu: You going to say that they're working on EUV lithography
Another DeepSeek moment. This is the world’s first actual smart phone. It’s an engineering prototype of ZTE’s Nubia M153 running ByteDance’s Doubao AI agent fused into Android at the OS level. It has complete control over the phone. It can see the UI, choose/download apps, tap/type, call, and run multi-step task chains.
Here I just say (in English) “find someone to wait in line for me” (something you can do in China), and it picks which app to open, configures the job, and hands me one confirm screen. I wouldn’t otherwise know how to do this, and here the phone just did it in a matter of seconds.
Checked out the Sanitation Robot Competition in Shenzhen last week.
It was amazing to see so many types of cleaning robots for streets and roads, a perfect use case for service robots.
Our @TaylorOgan & Chen Xiangming explore Shenzhen as a "Spinout City," where firms like DJI, Huawei, & BYD, plus uni incubators & a dense parts ecosystem, form an "alumni flywheel" that turns technical managers into founders & suppliers into platform companies, fueling innovation
It’s official! The 2026 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting will be held in China, and Shenzhen will take the stage as the host city.
From a border town to a global metropolis, Shenzhen has become a symbol of China’s reform and opening-up, with its GDP surging 13,600 times and population expanding 50-fold in just 45 years.
As the most influential economic cooperation mechanism in the Asia-Pacific region, APEC now looks to Shenzhen — where opportunities meets the world.
Read my latest for @nytimes , together with my colleague Dr. Jennifer Wong-Leung, featuring our latest ASPI research:
Shutting out China’s best minds will only push them into a homegrown Chinese research ecosystem that is already eclipsing American universities.
I’m at the Bay Area Semiconductor Expo in Shenzhen. A company called Qiyunfang, a subsidiary of 新凯来 (SiCarrier), just unveiled two fully domestic EDA software platforms: one for schematic and one for PCB design. Yet another Made in China 2025 success.
@thewirechina is doing a great series of short profiles on Chinese AI startups: Zhipu, Baichuan, MiniMax, Stepfun. The latest is on Moonshot AI, creator of Kimi K2. https://t.co/mUzZkAZXqm
For @gdnlongread, I profile'd Zhu Song-Chun, one of China's top AI scientists and an avatar of America's "reverse brain drain" problem. I detail why he left, the geopolitics of his repatriation, and the keys to AGI he may have brought back with him. https://t.co/rgHwYcppI6
Here’s a great overview and analysis (and English translation) of China’s new “AI Plus” plan.
It’s not about achieving some abstract idea of “AGI” but about practically infusing AI into every sector of the economy to drive productivity and growth. https://t.co/GBfSXDj7Li
This is crazy. There's a new mural being painted outside of where I play tennis in Shenzhen. I noticed they painted, "I CHOICE SZ" in balloon letters, instead of "I CHOOSE SZ". So I filed a ticket via 12345 WeChat Mini Program (Shenzhen's citizen hotline) at 3:06pm on Tuesday. Last night (Wednesday), it had been repainted!